Invasion of the Unidentified Smiley Objects?

An extremely reliable and trustworthy friend who in no way has a taste for games, especially on the internet, reports sighting unidentified smiley objects on this blog — and only on this blog — particularly while viewing one particular post, ironically titled Why I Love the Internet.* He further reports, “Where it is in the page depends on the level of zoom.”

*Ironic because it apparently should have been titled “Why I don’t understand the internet”.

I don’t see them, and I spend a good amount of time around here. But then again, I also don’t see the WordPress ads. And so I turn to you, Dear Reader. Do you ever see them? Or is my friend hallucinating? Or trolling me?

Better, do you know what’s going on?

I’m really just curious, and in the meantime, happy to learn my blog is seemingly a joyous place.

—————————————————————

Mystery solved, eight hours later: “It’s the little .gif file that the WordPress Stats plug-in* uses to monitor your page.” Different sitesresults describe it as appearing on the top; that first result described it as appearing “on the bottom”; my friend obviously spotted it elsewhere on his page; I scoured mine until I found one way over on the side, a couple of screens down. So, not entirely clear if there’s any discernible pattern. That first result also gave directions to remove it, but to do that you seem to need the ability to edit CSS, which I both don’t know how to do, and would have to pay WordPress, in exchange for the privelege, $30. Nope.

*Not sure why it’s called a plug-in when it’s really a built-in feature of WordPress.com. It’s possible the writer uses WordPress.org as his baseline, where perhaps it’s not built in? I don’t even know. There’s always more mystery.